A quarter were basically strap-hangers and a quarter were rock-stars. Youre moving the bar and buying into an emotional justification, War is hell. If youre not disciplining your force, youre saying its OK.. According to this source, after shooting the man, who turned out to be unarmed, Hyder proceeded to mutilate his body by stomping in his already damaged skull. These names are on this rock because these people conducted themselves in a way that did not bring glory to the teams. That was the end of that. Hyder said that his single shot had blasted open the mans head. They were the only shots not fired by the SEALs during the raid. But even that rule evolved over time. Scott Moore, right, then commander of SEAL Team 6. Evidence was presented that Slabinski gave an order to shoot all the men they encountered during another raid, whether or not they were armed. They ransacked the compound for documents and media for intelligence, left the survivors inside, and returned to Jalalabad air base with the body. The defense contractor, Atlantic Diving Supply, or ADS, has military supply and equipment contracts with SEAL Team 6, according to several former SEAL Team 6 operators, as well as other. You dont whistleblow on the teams and when you win on the battlefield, you dont lose investigations.. That operator, known as Red inside the unit, is still an active-duty member of SEAL Team 6 and has never been publicly identified. But we all see what we want to see. Slabinski and the Blue Squadron SEALs deployed to Afghanistan were frustrated, and that book gave them the answers they wanted to see: Terrorize the Taliban and theyd surrender. Its a schoolyard mentality. They realized the man had been trying to protect the women and children. MostSEALs did not commit atrocities, the sources said, but the problem was persistent and recurrent, like a stubborn virus. Some of those photographs, especially those taken of casualties from 2005 through 2008, show deceased enemy combatants with their skulls split open by a rifle or pistol round at the upper forehead, exposing their brain matter. The SEALs successes throughout 2002 resulted in the Joint Special Operations Command choosing the unit to lead the hunt for al Qaeda, as well as the invasion of Baghdad in March 2003. No single military unit has come to represent American military success or heroism more than SEAL Team 6, officially designated as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group andknown in military vernacular as DevGru, Team 6, the Command, and Task Force Blue. Hyder and an enlisted operator named Monty Heath had gone in a different direction and saw a survivor flee the bombed vehicle toward a nearby berm. A spokesperson at Naval Special Warfare, which oversees SEAL Team 6, declined repeated requests for interviews and refused to answer a detailed list of questions, writing in a statement, We do not entertain or support public discussion of classified information because it puts our forces, their families and our future operations at great risk. The SEAL command asserted that all members of Naval Special Warfare are required to comply with the Laws of Armed Conflict in the conduct of military operations.. Moore did not respond to requests for comment. Only three years later, Kevin Holland left the Navy. What he has not done is name the practice or reveal that by canoeing bin Laden he had secured the ultimate war trophy, the culmination of a decades worth of bloody sport by elements of SEAL Team 6 who considered themselves craftsmen of killing. Bottom: Britt Slabinski, left, and Capt. During the investigation, Bissonnette surrendered a photo of bin Ladens dead body that he had unlawfully retained. The SEALs were now going after low-level Taliban financiers and shadow governors. The two weapons found on the third floor were not discovered until the rooms were searched. Photos: U.S. Navy; U.S. Air Photo by Force Technical Sgt. A former SEAL Team 6 leader told me that ONeill and Bissonnette originally agreed to cooperate on a book or movie project after the raid was over, but later had a falling out. McRavens other directive required a more extensive post-operation review to document and justify combatant deaths. As a result, Howard became popular among the enlisted SEALs under his command, several of whom defended and praised him. I was going around to the different KIAs with my camera to take photos, Hyder told me in an interview, using the military term for enemies killed in action. Overall, it had become clear that Slabinskis run as a leader on the battlefield caused Blue Squadron to come off the rails, according to a former SEAL Team 6 leader. According to two senior SEAL Team 6 sources, however, the leadership dynamic in Blue Squadron was a failure. While on active duty, hed formed a consulting company with four other SEALs and secured a contract with one of the commands biggest equipment suppliers. Alarmed at seeing what he believed was a decapitation, he told Slabinski to go inside and see what the young operator was doing. Most would speak about the unit only on background or without attribution, because nearly every facet of SEAL Team 6 is classified. Iraq was a target rich environment, and Wyman allowed us to be more aggressive. According to several former SEAL Team 6 leaders, it was JSOC commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal who ordered the increased operational tempo and pushed SEAL Team 6, including Howard, to conduct more frequent raids to help wipe out the insurgency in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Among members of SEAL Team 6, this practice of desecrating enemy casualties was called canoeing., The canoeing photos are dramatic documentary evidence of the extreme and unnecessary violence that began to occur during multiple high-risk, exhausting, and traumatizing tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the legend of SEAL Team 6 grew, a rogue culture arose that operated outside of the Navys established mechanisms for command and investigation. Howards distribution of the hatchets worried several senior SEAL Team 6 members and some CIA paramilitary officers who worked with his squadron. He also claimed that bin Laden had been standing when he fired and that a weapon was visible nearby. Normally, SEAL Team 6s commanding officer, a captain, would conduct a captains mast, a form of non-judicial punishment. So while O'Neill's account definitely had a few questionable points, such as lining up with the Obama administration's narrative that bin Laden was within reach of a weapon and definitely presented a threat, Matt Bissonette/Mark Owen was probably incentivized to downplay O'Neill's role on the third deck. Red encountered and shot bin Ladens son just before the second floor landing, and the SEALs following behind him fanned out into the hallways and rooms on the second floor to search and secure the area. One of those operators was Neil Roberts. Several of us confronted the officers, said one former noncommissioned officer who tried to stop the criminal behavior. His superiors believed he had become unglued over the 2007 deployment. Earlier that evening, general officers from the Joint Special Operations Command had scrambled the SEALs after watching a Predator drone video feed of a man they suspected was bin Laden set off in a convoy of three or four vehicles in the Shah-i-Kot Valley, where al Qaeda forces had fortified themselves. It was then that both Bissonnette and ONeill hung back on the stairway. The intention was to permit women and children to get out of harms way before operators conducted their assault. By the time the two dozen Red Team operators departed for Objective Bull, tension had built up between Hyder, a commissioned officer, and the enlisted operators technically under his command. The flight took 90 minutes, and as the Black Hawk Bissonnette rode in approached the compound walls, it effectively slammed on the brakes. And afterwards, we added the psychological warfare.. There just isnt a need to carry a two-pound hatchet on the battlefield. For those who favored them, this former SEAL said, the hatchets could be justified as being no more than knives. It was given as an honor, one more step to strive for, another sign that youre doing a good job.. Previously, the command had required only a frontal shot and a profile of each dead militant. Moore, sitting in his office in Virginia Beach, pressed Vasely: What had he actually seen? But the directive had another benefit. One operator, who confirmed Howards remarks, added his own: Thats the business were in.. He had already set himself up for a profitable future. On the second floor of the SEAL Team 6 headquarters in the Dam Neck naval annex, a computer, known as the ops computer, stores the classified data on every mission the unit has completed for the past decade. Hyder said that he and a few other SEALs began to bury the casualties near a ravine by piling rocks over them. After three or four deployments in, you need more to get that stimulation. The hatchet was too intimate, too closely aligned with a tomahawk, to have been a good idea. The former SEAL, who himself had served in Red during his career, said that by giving operators the weapon of their battlefield persona, Howard sent an unmistakable message to his men: Use it. Neil Brown Jr. as Chief Warrant Officer 2 Raymond "Ray" Perry, formerly Senior Chief Special Warfare Operator a.k.a. That seems more fair. And here were two guys who set out to make money off a mission that required 23 SEALs to pull off: Its dishonorable., Bissonnette and ONeill are no longer welcome at SEAL Team 6 headquarters. Slabinkski and others in the squadron had fallen under the influence of an obscure war novel, Devils Guard, published in 1971 by George Robert Elford. Officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, SEAL Team 6 is today the most celebrated of the U.S. military's special mission units. asking for money). One former SEAL Team 6 senior leadersaid that he and others at the command were concerned that the scale and intensity of the violence in Iraq was so great that U.S. operators might be tempted to engage in retaliatory mutilations, a tactic al Qaeda and the Iraqi insurgency sometimes employed. After participating in May 2011's Operation Neptune Spear with SEAL Team Six, O'Neill was the subject of controversy for claiming to be the sole individual to kill Osama bin Laden . Former Seal Upvoted by Edward Tomlinson , former Damage Controlman at United States Navy (1988-1992) and Pavanne Halpin , former Manager of Pacemaker/Holter Clinic at United States Navy (2001-2005) Updated 7 mo Bad news. Consider what the world of media would look like without The Intercept. A joint NCIS-FBI investigation into whether he disclosed classified material in the book lasted two years. During a late-night raid at a northern Kunar compound, Silver Squadron operators killed several captors but accidentally killed Norgrove when an inexperienced SEAL threw a fragment grenade at one of the captors. One former SEAL Team 6 leader who was involved in the raid told me he was never too concerned about the discrepancies between ONeills and Bissonnettes claims. Just eight months after taking over JSOC, after a series of complaints from the Afghan government over special operations night raids and civilian deaths, McRaven sought to pull Team 6 back from its overly aggressive stance. We failed to fix the problem, he said. When it was commissioned, the Navy had only two SEAL (Sea, Air, and Land) assault teams, but founding officer Cmdr. The SEALs in the unit were furious that the White House revealed to the world that Navy SEALs had carried out the raid, violating the traditional code of silence about their missions. They shot an unarmed dude. Howard took the units identity seriously, and after 9/11, despite the questionable circumstances that led to his ascent, his influence steadily grew. The death andattempted decapitation of Neil Roberts on Takur Ghar affected no one so profoundly as Britt Slabinski, the operator who led the rescue team back up the mountainonly to find that Roberts was already dead. Inside, they found six militants, four in one room, all sleeping with weapons near their beds. Unlawful violence, aberrations from rules of engagement, mutilations, and disrespect of enemy casualties, actions that had been isolated at the beginning of the Afghan war, had by this point spread throughout SEAL Team 6. Red Squadron snipers killed three pirates who were holding Phillips in a lifeboat. In the book, Bissonnette implies that he was directly behind Red just below the third floor when bin Laden was shot, and was one of the next two SEALs who entered bin Ladens bedroom. Hyder acknowledged that the man likely did not understand English and probably couldnt see very well. Historically, SEAL Team 6 is known as a unit where officers rent their lockers, because they typically serve about three years before rotating out, whereas the enlisted operators remain for much of their careers, often for a decade or more. Top left: Red Squadron tattoo. We dont have ads, so we depend on our members 35,000 and counting to help us hold the powerful to account. Theres no military purpose for it, a former Red Squadron operator told me. Like Vic Hyder, he struggled to command the respect of his men. Created in 1980 and based at the Dam Neck Annex of Naval Air Station Oceana near Virginia Beach, the command prided itself on its culture of nonconformity with the larger military. SEALs were given wide berth as long as they could explain why they made the decision to shoot an unarmed person. What's more, they found. Unlike the SEALs, the man was not wearing night-vision goggles. SEAL TEAM 6 also known as Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU) chooses guys from the SEAL teams and put them through a screening process called Green team. In the early 1980s, a group of seasoned enlisted SEAL Team 6 operators kicked McRaven off a training exercise, relieving him of his already tenuous command for being too rule-bound. By Navy Times staff. One of the two SEALs who knew about the grenade eventually told his team leader, who then failed to inform his commanders until he was confronted the next day. Illustrations: Attila Futaki, Colorist: Greg Guilhaumond, Matthew Cole[emailprotected]theintercept.com@matthewacole, The SEALs believe that they can handle the discipline themselves, thats equal to or greater than what the criminal justice system would give to the person.. His name was added to SEAL. Inside the vehicle were one or two rifles, as is customary in Afghanistan, but none of the men wore military clothing or had any extra ammunition. The SEALs quickly intervened and made a deal with the CIA station in Kabul. For some of them, what was most troubling was not that Hyder mighthave taken gratuitous revenge for Robertss death on an unrelated civilian, but that on more than one occasion, as ground force commander, he had fired his own weapon to neutralize perceived threats. McRaven, who was informed of the killings only after he knew Phillips was safe, was incensed. No cuts were visible in the photos, according to a military official who has reviewed the file. Theyre telling you how they remember it. Iraq was a different kind of war nothing wed ever seen, said the now-retired Team 6 leader. Ten days later, the internal JSOC investigation was closed. In the ensuing 17-hour battle with the al Qaeda fighters, six more Americans were killed, and several were wounded. Beginning in 2005 and continuing through 2008, as U.S. Special Operations forces became more central to the American military strategy, the number and frequency of operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan increased dramatically. The commands top noncommissioned officer placed their names on the SEAL Team 6 rock of shame, the unofficial list of unit pariahs. Parts of SEAL Team 6 began acting with an air of impunity that disturbed observers within the command. ONeill has not been shy about the fact that he canoed bin Laden. Our job is to ensure that we conduct ourselves in a way befitting the American people and the American flag. Both operators were accused of breaking with standard operating procedure to get themselves in position to be among the first to see or kill bin Laden. Top right: A bearded Red Squadron SEAL in Afghanistan. Top:Photo of helicopter onTakur Ghar. Bottom right: Candid photo of U.S. Navy SEAL Neil Roberts. Bissonnette eventually settled his legal case with the government, agreeing to return $6.7 million in profits from the sale of No Easy Day and giving up any proceeds from future sales of the book. Created in 1980 and based at the. Inside a heated tent, as many as 40 SEAL Team 6 operators asked themselves how they wanted to treat their fallen enemies. When he finally entered the bedroom, alone, bin Laden was standing uninjured, a weapon nearby, his wife in front of him like a human shield. After I shot this dude in the head, there was a guy who had his feet, just his feet, sticking out of some little rut or something over here. He told us they had put unit and self before mission and country, the retired officer said. A Predator drone video feed filmed an enemy fighter standing over Robertss body for two minutes, trying to behead the dead American with a knife. Back at the base, hegave a speech to a group of analysts and nonoperational officers in which he told them that his bloody appearance was a demonstration of how a battlefield commander should lead. There was no plan for capture, and no contingency for a surrender. But hidden behind the heroic narratives is a darker, more troubling story of revenge ops, unjustified killings, mutilations, and other atrocities a pattern of criminal violence that emergedsoon after the Afghan war began and was tolerated and covered up by the commands leadership. We talked about it and 35 guys nodded their heads saying this is not who we are. Bissonnettes helicopter crashed into bin Ladens side yard. By 2007, when Howard and Red Squadron showed up with their hatchets in Iraq, internal reports of operators using the weapons to hack dead and dying militants were provided to both the commanding officer of SEAL Team 6 at that time, Capt. Seal team 6 rock of shame. The retired SEAL, who spent the better part of two decades at the command, said he never asked Hyder why he mutilated the corpse. It wasnt necessary. The SEALs had been specifically asked to avoid shooting bin Laden in the face. Both teams exited the helicopters to find a grim scene. When he first arrived at Dam Neck, operators in the unit who had served in Vietnam warned him that war crimes and battlefield atrocities hung like a cloud over the entire unit even if only one SEAL had participated. Our sense of whats right and whats wrong is warped. Both men were notorious among their teammates for their self-promotional tendencies a trait not well-suited for a team-first environment. After all that activity, hed been hiding in a ditch for 90 minutes, he gets up, hes spoken to, yelled at in the dark its disturbing. In that operation, Hyder led a team of Red operators on a nighttime mission to capture suspected al Qaeda militants in a compound. 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